Trump just added 4 million new soldiers to his Twitter bot army, and we didn't even notice

Trump just added 4 million new soldiers to his Twitter bot army, and we didn't even notice

Forget what you've heard about Donald Trump's declining popularity from the #FakeNewsMedia. The president's approval ratings have spiked in the past few months among the critical egg avatar demographic on Twitter.

The president currently enjoys 31 million followers on Twitter, far less than Barack Obama's 89.2 million and way too high for a man who doesn't know how to thread properly.

Though Trump nonetheless experienced a fairly steady increase in his number of followers over the past three and half months, the vast majority of them appear to be bots.

His bot army is growing stronger by the day, and we just don't know what they want.

We took a look at Trump's recent uptick in followers with Social Rank and Socialbakers, both social analytics tools, as well as Twitter Audit, a programme which combs through Twitter to sort real followers from fake ones.

Here's what we found.

The president experienced an increase of 2.3 million followers in May, adding approximately 573,000 followers each week.

Photo: Social Baker

Since February 7th, the president has gained almost 7 million followers, Social Rank reports. None of this is particularly surprising-Trump is, after all, a new president with a growing audience.

What is strange is the percentage of his new followers that appear to be bots. Of Trump's 7 million new followers, 4 million of them are egg avatars, who are disproportionately likely to be fake.

Photo: Twitter/realdonaldtrump

When Trump had 24.1 million followers in February, by comparison, just 5 million of them were egg accounts, according to Social Rank.

Approximately 57 per cent of Trump's new followers since February are egg avatars. More of his followers appear to be bots than humans. It's a significant, if not alarming, spike.

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